Taylor Swift’s Favorite De-Stressing Technique Is Backed by a Ton of Science

We’ve all come home wound up after a long day at work with jangled nerves. Imagine coming home and winding down after singing and dancing for three-and-a-half hours to 65,000 screaming fans. That’s what Taylor Swift had to do after every performance on her Eras Tour. 

How did she manage it? As the pop icon recently explained on late night with Stephen Colbert, some of her go-to post-show de-stressing techniques are exactly what you’d imagine. She changes out of her costume and gets straight into the bath for what she calls “mermaid time.” Then she orders a ton of room service. 

She also signs about 2,000 CDs. That might sound like the least relatable, most pop star thing you could possibly do to end the day. But as she talked about her post-concert ritual, I realized her technique is actually a variation of a research-backed stress-busting approach that’s recommended by psychologists for all of us non-superstars too. 

How Taylor Swift winds down after a show 

“After the show, you know that kind of feeling where you’re sort of like a flickering light bulb? That’s crazy,” Swift says, describing her post-concert mental state. “That’s hard to go to sleep after.” 

While few of us have completed record-breaking world tours, most of us can recognize the wired refusal of your nervous system to calm down that she describes. And many of us will sympathize with the impulse to put on some athleisure and shove french fries in our mouths as a coping mechanism. 

Fewer of us would think to write our own names over and over a couple of thousand times. Signing CDs, Swift explains, isn’t a promotional requirement of pop stardom (at least that’s not all it is). It’s also a way to use simple, repetitive physical activity to calm her adrenalized brain. 

“My profession,” she explains, “is coming up with ideas for stuff, so if I can turn off the ideas for a second, very exciting.” One best ways to do that on tour, she discovered, is “doing tactile hand activity” like signing CDs. 

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